Exhaust Box

[Rick Maitland]

It seems like I read several months back about someone building a sealed box with a vector grid for a top. Then install a fan in the side of the box. This would create a suction on the material and cause it to lay flat. Does anyone have this setup, if so how well does it work. I would like to use PC cooling fans but not sure if that would create enough suction.

[Rodne Gold]

Well , the idea is to use an aluminium sheet drilled with many pin holes as the top of the box and use a vacuum cleaner motor or cheap shop vac as the source of vacuum , its pretty easy to build and its cheap.
PC fans wont cut it at all.
A vector grid wont work either unless you have ENORMOUS vacuum , the holes are way too large to sustain any suction thats meaningful.

[Rick Maitland]

Thank you very much for the tips Rodne! I completed the exhaust box this weekend and ran many stencil jobs, and it worked perfect. I used your advise on the shop vacuum. I also used a sheetmetal return grille (very simular to the vector tables) as a top lid. The material I was cutting covered the entire grid so the box had plenty of suction to hold it down. After each run I pulled the grid out, fliped it over to dump the little cut pieces in the box and started again. Clean up was very quick and easy. Thanks again.